The MIT Pressrlstrick/rsvtxt/buckmorss.pdf · sensitivity to cultural norms of beauty), all of this is a posteriori. The senses maintain an uncivilized and uncivilizable trace, a

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Aesthetics and Anaesthetics Walter Benjamins Artwork Essay Reconsidered Author(s) Susan Buck-Morss Source October Vol 62 (Autumn 1992) pp 3-41 Published by The MIT Press Stable URL httpwwwjstororgslable7n700

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Aesthetics and Anaesthetics Walter Benjamins Artwork

Essay Reconsidered

SUSAN BUCKmiddotMORSS

I

Walter Benjamins essay The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproductionl is generally taken to be an affirmation of mass culture and of the new technologies through which it is disseminated And rightly so Benjamin praises the cognitive hence political potential of technologically mediated culshytural experience (film is particularly privileged)2 Yet the dosing section of this 1936 essay reverses the optimistic tone It sounds a warning Fascism is a violation of the technical apparatus that parallels fascisms violent attempt to organize the newly proletarianized masses -not by giving them their due but by allowing them to express themselves5 The logical result of Fascism is the introduction of aesthetics into politicallife4

Benjamin seldom makes sweeping condemnations but here he states catshyegorically All efforts to render politics aesthetic culminate in one thing war He is writing during the early period of fascist military adventurism-Italys colonial war in Ethiopia Germanys intervention in the Spanish Civil War Yet Benjamin recognizes that the aesthetic justification of this policy was already in place at the centurys start It was the Futurists who just before World War I

I am grateful to Joan Sage for her help with the photographs for this piece I This is the now-conventional English translation (see Harry Zohn trans IUuminations ed Hannah Arendt [New York Schocken Books 1969]) The literal translation of the German tide is significantly different The Anwork in the Age of its Technological Reproducibility (technischm Reprodwierbarlleit) I have sidestepped the problem by using a shonened form Artwork essay 2 The best reading of Benjamins Anwork essay remains Miriam Hansens essay Benjamin Cinema and Experience The Blue Flower in the Land of Technology Ntw GtTllQn Critique 40 (Winter 1987) 3 The masses have the right to a change in propeny relations Fascism seeks to give them a form of expression in the preservation of these relations (Benjamin IUuminations p 241 trans modified) 4 Ibid S Ibid

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first articulated the cult of warfare as a form of aesthetics Benjamin cites their manifesto

War is beautiful because it establishes human domination over the subjugated machinery thanks to the gas masks the terror-producing megaphones the flame-throwers the small tanks War is beautiful because it initiates the dreamt of metalization of the human body War is beautiful because it enriches a flowering meadow with the fiery orchids of machine guns War is beautiful because it fuses gunshyfire cannonades cease-fires the scents and stench of putrefaction into a symphony War is beautiful because it creates the new archishytectural form of big tanks geometrical flight formations smoke spishyrals from burning villages 6

Benjamin concludes

Fiat ars-pereat mundus [create art-destroy the world] says Fasshycism and expects war to supply just as Marinetti confesses that it does the artistic gratification of a sense perception that has been altered by technology This is the obvious perfection of art pour Iart Humanity that according to Homer was once an object of spectacle [Schauobjekl] for the Olympian gods now is one for itself Its selfshyalienation has reached such a degree that it is capable of experiencing [erleben] its own destruction as an aesthetic enjoyment [Genuss] of the highest order So it is with the aestheticization of politics which is being managed by fascism Communism responds with the politicishyzation of art8

This paragraph has haunted me for the twenty-odd years I have been reading the Artwork essay-a period when politics as spectacle (including the aestheticized spectacle of war) has become a commonplace in our televisual world Benjamin is saying that sensory alienation lies at the source of the aestheticization of politics which fascism does not create but merely manages (betreibt) We are to assume that both alienation and aestheticized politics as the sensual conditions of modernity outlive fascism-and thus so does the enjoyshyment taken in viewing our own destruction

The Communist response to this crisis is to politicize art implyingshywhat Surely Benjamin must mean more than merely to make culture a vehicle

6 Ibid p 242 (trans modified) 7 A distortion of the Baroque original Create justice transform the world the electoral promise of Emperor Ferdinand I (1563) See Walter Benjamin Gesamnuite Schriften 13 ed Rolf Tiedemann and Hermann Schweppenhaeuser (Frankfurt aM Suhrkamp Verlag 1974) p 1055 8 Benjamin lUuminatioru p 242 (trans modified)

5

Aesthetics and Anaesthetics

for Communist propaganda9 He is demanding of art a task far more difficult -that is to undo the alienation of the corporeal sensorium to restore the instincshytual power of the human bodily senses for the sake of humanitys self-preservation and to do this not by avoiding the new technologies but by passing through them

The problem of interpreting the closing section of Benjamins text lies in the fact that halfway through this final thought (aestheticized politics politicized art) Benjamin changes the constellation in which his conceptual terms (politics art aesthetics) are deployed and hence their meaning If we were really to politicize art in the radical way he is suggesting art would cease to be art as we know it Moreover the key term aesthetics would shift its meaning one hundred and eighty degrees Aesthetics would be transformed indeed reshydeemed so that ironically (or dialectically) it would describe the field in which the antidote to fascism is deployed as a political response

This point may seem trivial or unnecessarily sophistic But if it is allowed to develop it changes the entire conceptual order of modernity That is my claim Benjamins critical understanding of mass society disrupts the tradition of modernism (far more radically incidentally than does his contemporary Martin Heidegger) by exploding the constellation of art politics and aesthetics into which by the twentieth century this tradition has congealed

II

What I will not try to do is to take you through the whole history of Western metaphysics in order to demonstrate the permutations of this constelshylation in terms of the inner-historical development of philosophy a decontexshytualized life of the mind Others have done this with sufficient brilliance to make dear the unfruitfulness of this approach for the problem with which we are dealing because it presumes just that continuity in cultural tradition which Benjamin wanted to explode 1o

9 OtheTwUe the two conditions cTisis and Tesponse would tum out to be the same Once an is drawn into politics (Communist politics no less than Fascist politics) how could it help but put itself into its service thus to rendeT up to politics its own artistic powers ie aestheticize politics 10 HeideggeT has been paniculaTly concerned with the philosophical wanderings of the key term aesthetics in Westem philosophy (see eg his lectures fTom 193637-contempoTaneous with Benjamins essay-Nietzsche Dn- Wille zur Macht als Kunst vol 43 of Martin HeideggeT Gesammtausgabe 11 AbteiJung Vorlesungen 1923-76 [Frankfun aM VittoTio KlosteTmann 1985) FOT a provocatively cTitical contextualized account of the discourse ofaesthetics within the modem eTa of EUTopean cultuTe see TeTry Eagleton The Ideology of the Aesthetic (London Basil Blackwell 1990) FOT an excellent intellectual history of the connection between aesthetics and politics in GeTman thought that stTesses the importance of Hellenism in general and of Winckelmann in particulaT (omitted from Eagletons account) the idea of the Greeks as an aesthetic and cultuTal people in contTast to material and imperial Rome see Josef Chytry The Aesthetic State A Quest in Modern German Thought (BeTkeley UniveTsity of California Press 1989)

6 OCTOBER

But it will be helpful to recall the original etymological meaning of the word aesthetics because it is precisely to this origin that via Benjamins revolution we find ourselves returned Aistkitilws is the ancient Greek word for that which is perceptive by feeling Aistkisis is the sensory experience of pershyception The original field ofaesthetics is not art but reality-corporeal material nature As Terry Eagleton writes Aesthetics is born as a discourse of the body11 It is a form of cognition achieved through taste touch hearing seeing smell-the whole corporeal sensorium The terminae of all of these-nose eyes ears mouth some of the most sensitive areas of skin-are located at the surface of the body the mediating boundary between inner and outer This physical-cognitive apparatus with its qualitatively autonomous nonfungible senshysors (the ears cannot smell the mouth cannot see) is out front of the mind encountering the world prelinguisticallyI2 hence prior not only to logic but to meaning as well Of course all of the senses can be acculturated-that is the whole point of philosophical interest in aesthetics in the modern era IS But however strictly the senses are trained (as moral sensibility refinement of taste sensitivity to cultural norms of beauty) all of this is a posteriori The senses maintain an uncivilized and uncivilizable trace a core of resistance to cultural domestication I This is because their immediate purpose is to serve instinctual needs-for warmth nourishment safety sociabilityl5-in short they remain a part of the biological apparatus indispensable to the self-preservation of both the individual and the social group

III

So little does aesthetics have to do intrinsically with the philosophical trinity of Art Beauty and Truth that one might rather place it within the field of

II Eagleton IdeolotrJ of1M MslMtic p 13 Eagleton is dealing with the historical birth ofaesthetics as a modern discourse (specifically in the work of the mid-eighteenth-century German philosopher Alexander Baumgarten) and describes the political implications of this anti-Cartesian focus on the dense swarming territory outside of the mind that comprises nothing less than the whole of our sensate life together as the first stirrings ofa primitive materialism -ofthe bodys long inarticulate rebellion against the tyranny of the theoretical (p 13) 12 This was its meaning for Baumgarten who first developed the aesthetic as an autonomous thematic in philosophy Yet Eagleton is correct to note that the affirmation of sense experience is short-lived in Baumgartens theory If his AuIMtica (1750) opens up in an innovative gesture the whole terrain of sensation what it opens it up to is in effect the colonization of reason (Eagleton IdeolotrJ of 1M AuIMtic p 15) 13 See eg Rousseaus discussion of the education of the senses in Emile 14 Baumgarten distinguishes between auIMtica arlijicialis (to which he devotes the majority of his text) and aesthetica MlIiralis as it is observed in childrens play 15 Sociability is not only a historico-cultural category but a part of our nature That much must be granted to sociobiology (and to Aristotle and Marx for that matter) The mistake is to presume that todays societies are accurate expressions of this biological instinct It could be argued for example that precisely in its most biological aspect (reproduction of the species) the privatized family is unsocial

7 Aesthetics and Anaesthetics

animal instincts 16 This is of course just what made philosophers suspicious of the aesthetic Even as Alexander Baumgarten articulated aesthetics for the first time as an autonomous field of inquiry he was aware that one could accuse him of concerning himself with things unworthy of a philosopher17

Just how it happened that within the course of the modern era the term aesthetics underwent a reversal of meaning so that in Benjamins time it was applied first and foremost to art-to cultural forms rather than sensible expeshyrience to the imaginary rather than the empirical to the illusory rather than the real-is not self-evident It demands a critical exoteric explanation of the socioeconomic and political context in which the discourse of the aesthetic was deployed as Terry Eagleton has recently demonstrated in The Ideology of the Aesthetic Eagleton traces the ideological implications of this concept during its checkered career in the modern era-how it bounces like a ball among philoshysophical positions from its critical-materialist connotations in Baumgartens original articulation to its class-based meaning in the work of Shaftesbury and Burke as an aesthetics of sensibility an aristocratic moral style and thence to Germany There throughout the tradition of German idealism it was recogshynized with varying degrees of caution as a legitimate cognitive mode yet evershymore fatally connected with the sensuous the heteronomous the fictitious only to end up in the neo-Kantian schemata of Habermas as (to cite FredricJameson) a kind of sandbox to which one consigns all those vague things under the heading of the irrational [where] they can be monitored and in case of need controlled (the aesthetic is in any case conceived as a kind of safety valve for irrational impulses)18

The story is quite incredible really particularly when one considers the leitmotif that runs through all of these alterations the ground from which the aesthetic pushes forth in its various forms It is the motif of autogenesis surely one of the most persistent myths in the whole history of modernity (and of Western political thought before then one might add19 Doing one better

16 Again the relation is dialectical if neither the individual nor the social ever exists as nature but always only as second nature (hence culturally constructed) it is equally true that neither the individual nor the social enters into the culturally constructed world without leaving a remainshyder a biological substrate that can provide the basis for resistance 17 Benedetto Croce cited in Hans Rudolf Schweizer AesthetiJt als PhilosDphie dn- Sinnlichnl Ershylunntnis (Basil Schwabe and Co 1973) p 33 Schweizer claims against Croce that Baumgarten was not overly concerned or apologetic and that the real bias against the aesthetic is a later development 18 Fredric Jameson Lak Marxism Adorno or the Persistencll of the Dialectic (New York Verso 1990) p 232 19 The birth of the Greek polis is attributed precisely to the wondrous idea that man can produce himself IIX nihilo The polis becomes the artifact of man in which he can bring forth as a material reality his own higher essence Similarly Machiavelli wrote in praise of the Prince who self-creatively founds a new principality and connects this autogenetic act with the height of manliness

8 OCTOBER

than Virgin birth modern man homo autotelus literally produces himself genshyerating himself to cite Eagleton miraculously out of [his] own substance20

What seems to fascinate modern man about this myth is the narcissistic illusion of total control The fact that one can imagine something that is not is extrapolated in the fantasy that one can (re)create the world according to plan (a degree of control impossible for example in the creation of a living breathshying child) It is the fairy-tale promise that wishes are granted-without the fairy tales wisdom that the consequences can be disastrous It must be admitted that this myth of creative imagination has had salutary effects as it is intimately entwined with the idea of freedom in Western history For that reason (an excellent reason) it has been staunchly defended and highly praised21

Yet present feminist consciousness in scholarship has revealed how fearful of the biological power of women this mythic construct can be22 The truly autogenetic being is entirely self-contained If it has any body at all it must be one impervious to the senses hence safe from external control Its potency is in its lack of corporeal response In abandoning its senses it of course gives up sex Curiously it is precisely in this castrated form that the being is gendered male-as if having nothing so embarrassingly unpredictable or rationally unshycontrollable as the sense-sensitive penis it can then confidently claim to be the phallus Such an asensual anaesthetic protruberance is this artifact modern man

Consider Kant on the sublime He writes that faced with a threatening and menacing nature-towering cliffs a fiery volcano a raging sea-our first impulse connected (not unreasonably) to self-preservation23 is to be afraid Our senses tell us that faced with natures might our ability to resist becomes an insignificant trifie24 But says Kant there is a different more sensible (I) standard which we acquire when viewing these awesome forces from a safe place by which nature is small and our superiority immense

Though the irresistibility of natures might makes us considered as natural beings recognize our physical impotence it reveals in us at the same time an ability to judge ourselves independent of nature

20 Eagleton IdeD of the Aesthetic p 64 21 See Carlos Castoriades The Imaginary Institution of Society trans Kathleen Blamey (Camshybridge MIT Press 1987) 22 See for example the work of Luce lrigaray For an excellent discussion of the parameters of the feminist debate see articles by Seyla Ben habib Judith Butler and Nancy Frazer in Praxis InlertuJlirnw12 (July 1991) pp 137-77 23 This first impulse might in fact be considered superior But Kant writes condescendingly of the Savoyard peasant who unlike the enraptured bourgeois tourist did not hesitate to call anyone a fool who fancies glaciered mountains (Immanuel Kant Criliqtu of Judgement trans Werner S Pluhar [Indianapolis Hackett 1987J p 124) 24 Kant Critiqtu ofJudgement pp 120-21 Again from an ecological perspective this is not a foolish response


and reveals in us a superiority over nature that is the basis of a selfshypreservation quite different in kind 115

It is at this point in the text that the modern constellation of aesthetics politics and war congeals linking the fate of those three elements Kants example of the man most worthy of respect is the warrior impervious to all his sense-giving information of danger Hence no matter how much people may dispute when they compare the statesman with the general as to which one deserves the superior respect an aesthetic [sic] judgment decides in favor of the general26 Both statesman and general are held by Kant in higher aesthetic esteem than the artist as both in shaping reality rather than its representations are mimickshying the autogenetic prototype the nature- and self-producing Judeo-Christian God

I f in the Third Critique the aesdietic in judgments is robbed of its senses in the Second Critique the senses play no role at all The moral being is senseshydead from the start Again Kants ideal is autogenesis The moral will cleansed of any contamination by the senses (which in the First Critique are the source of all cognition) sets up its own rule as a universal norm Reason produces itself in Kants morality-the most sublimely when ones own life is sacrificed to the idea

The further Kant goes Ernst Cassirer writes the more he rids himself of the prevailing sentimentality of the Age of Sensibility27 To be historshyically accurate it should be acknowledged that this sensibility influenced enorshymously by Johann Winckelmanns conception of Hellenism was homophilic It affirmed the aesthetic beauty first and foremost of the male body Indeed homoerotic sensuality may have been even more threatening to the emerging modernist psyche than the reproductive sexuality of women1I8 Kants transcenshydental subject purges himself of the senses which endanger autonomy not only because they unavoidably entangle him in the world but specifically because they make him passive (languid [schmtlzend] is Kants word) instead of active (vigorous [wacker])29 susceptible like Oriental voluptuaries30 to sympathy and tears Cassirer writes that this was

the reaction of Kants completely virile way of thinking to the effemshyinacy and over-softness that he saw in control of all around him It

25 Ibid 26 Ibidbull pp 121-22 27 Ernst Cassirer Kants Life and Thought trans James Haden intro Stephan Korner (New Haven Yale University Press 1981) p 269 28 Was it merely a coincidence that Kant praised as sublime precisely those Swiss alps the size and precipitous appearance of which so appalled Winckelman that upon coming within sight of them in 1768 he abandoned his planned return to Germany and turned back to Italy 29 Kant Critique ofJwJgement p 133 30 Ibid p 134

10 OCTOBER

is in this sense in fact that he came to be understood Not only Schiller who explicitly lamented in a letter to Kant that he had momentarily taken on the aspect of an opponent but Wilhelm von Humbolt Goethe and Holderlin also concur in this judgment Goethe extols as Kants immortal service that he released morality from the feeble and servile estate into which it had faUen through the crude calculus of happiness and thus brought us all back from the effeminacy [WeichlichkeitJ in which we were wallowingl

The theme of the autonomous autotelic subject as sense-dead and for this reason a manly creator a self-starter sublimely self-contained2 appears throughout the nineteenth century-as does the association of the aesthetics of this creator with the warrior and hence with war At the end of the century with Nietzsche there is a new affirmation of the body but it remains selfshycontained taking the highest pleasure in its own biophysical emanations Nietzsches ideal of the artist-philosopher the embodiment of the Will to Power manifests the elitist values of the warrior perhaps so far distant from other men that he can form themmiddot This combination of autoerotic sexuality and wielding power over others is what Heidegger calls Nietzsches Mannesaestheshytik5 It is to replace what Nietzsche himself calls Weibesaesthetik6- U female aesthetics of receptivity to sensations from the outside

One could go on documenting this solopsistic-and often truly siIlyshyfantasy of the phallus this tale of all-male reproduction the magic art of creation ex nihilo But although the theme will return below I want to argue for the philosophical fruitfulness of a different approach one more in line with Benshyjamins own method in the Artwork essay And that is to trace the development not of the meaning of terms but of the human sensorium itself

31 Cassirer Kants Lift and TJurught p 270 Cassirer is citing Goethes comment to Chancellor von Muller April 1818 (The translation in Cassirers book is more strongly gendered than Goethes text Thanks to Alexandra Cook for pointing this out) Goethes famous study of Winckelmann (1805) praises him for living a life close to the ancient Hellenic ideal This included explicitly his sensual relationships with beautiful young men It was Kants CrilU(ue ofJudgement that captivated Goethe (Cassirer p 273) 32 To be sufficient to oneself and hence have no need of society yet without being unsociable ie without shunning society is something approaching the sublime as is any case of setting aside our needs (CrilU(ue ofJudgement p 136) 33 The work of warriors is an instinctive creation and imposition of forms they do not know what guilt responsibility or consideration are they exemplify that terrible anists egoism that knows itself justified to all eternity in its work like a mother in her child (Niettsche cited in Eagleton p 237) 34 Friedrich Niettsche The Will 10 Puwer trans Walter Kaufmann and R J Hollingdale (New York Random House 1967) p 419 35 Heidegger Nielrsche pp 91-92 The dichotomy ofterms does not appear in Nietzsches text 36 Nietzsche Will 10 POWttr p 429

Brain of Sonja Kovaltvskaya Rtmian mathematician (1840-1901)

IV

The senses are effects of the nervous system composed of hundreds of billions of neurons extending from the body surfaces through the spinal cord to the brain The brain it must be said yields to philosophical reflection a sense of the uncanny In our most empiricist moments we would like to take the matter of the brain itself for the mind (What could be more appropriate than the brain studying the brain) But there seems to be such an abyss between us alive as we look out on the world and that gray-white gelatinous mass with its cauliflower-like convolutions that is the brain (the biochemistry of which does not differ qualitatively from that of a sea slug) that intuitively we resist naming them as identical If this I who examines the brain were nothing but the brain how is it that I feel so uncomprehendingly alien in its presence

Hegel thus has intuition on his side in his attacks against the brain-watchshyers If you want to understand human thought he argues in The Phenomenology of Mind dont place the brain on a dissecting table or feel the bumps on the head for phrenological information If you want to know what the mind is examine what it does-thus turning philosophy away from natural science to

37 Modern philosophers have quite persistently refused to conAate the brain with the mindM

(alias ego a_ Seele soul subject Gmt) Descartes gave the soul protection from the body machine of the brain-nerves-muscles by locating it in a certain extremely small gland suspended in the middle of the brain (see TJu Passions of 1M Soul) Kants transcendental consciousness of the self manages to bypass the brain from the start

Vincml Van Gogh P()lIard Birches 1885

the study of human culture and human history The two discourses henceforth went separate ways philosophy of the mind and physiology of the brain reshymained for the most part as blind to the activities of one another as the two hemispheres of a split-brain patient are oblivious to the operations of each other-arguably to the detriment of both3M

The nervous system is not contained within the bodys limits The circuit from sense-perception to motor response begins and ends in the world The brain is thus not an isolable anatomical body but part of a system that passes through the person and her or his (culturally specific historically transient) environment As the source of stimuli and the arena for motor response the external world must be included to complete the sensory circuit (Sensory deshyprivation causes the systems internal components to degenerate) The field of the sensory circuit thus corresponds to that of experience in the classical philosophical sense of a mediation of subject and object and yet its very comshyposition makes the so-called split between subject and object (which was the

38 Contemporary brain research while impressive in its application of new technologies that allow us to see the brain in ever-greater detail has suffered from too little philosophical and theoretical radicalism while philosophy risks speaking in a language so archaic given the new empirical discoveries of neuro-science that it relegates itself to scholastic irrelevance-or simply to myth

Recently there has been an interest in reconnecting the discourses See eg bull Patricia Smith Churchland NeurophilosOfJh Toward a Unified Scienct of the Mind-Brain (Cambridge MIT Press 1986) J Z Young Philosoph and the Brain (New York Oxford University Press 1987) and the many books by the prolific author R M Young

Illustration of cells described by Vladimir Betz

constant plague of classical philosophy) simply irrelevant In order to differshyentiate our description from the more limited traditional conception of the human nervous system which artificially isolates human biology from its envishyronment we will call this aesthetic system of sense-consciousness decentered from the classical subject wherein external sense-perceptions come together with the internal images of memory and anticipation the synaesthetic sysshytem31

This synaesthetic system is open in the extreme sense Not only is it open to the world through the sensory organs but the nerve cells within the body form a network that is in itself discontinuous They reach out toward other nerve cells at points called synapses where electrical charges pass through the space between them Whereas in blood vessels a leak is lamentable in the networks between nerve bundles everything leaks Any cross section of the brain levels show this architectonic discontinuity and the dendrite-like morshyphology of their extensions The giant pyramid-like layer of cells in the brain cortex was first described in 1874 by the Ukrainian anatomist Vladimir Betz1O

A decade later coincidentally Vincent van Gogh while a mental patient at St Remy found this form replicated in the external world

39 If the center of this system is not in the brain but on the bodys surface then subjectivity far from bounded within the biological body plays the role of mediator between inner and outer sensations the images of perception and those of memory For this reason Freud situated conshysciousness on the surface of the body decentered from the brain (which he was willing to view as nothing more than large and evolved nerve ganglia) 40 Betl left no illustration of the cells he described and that were named after him

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v

Let us resist for a moment Hegels abandonment of physiology and follow the neurological inquiry of one of his contemporaries the Scottish anatomist Sir Charles Bell Trained in painting as well as surgical medicine Bell with great excitement studied the fifth nerve the grand nerve of expression in

uthe belief that the countenance is the index of the mindmiddotThe expressive face is indeed a wonder of synthesis as individual as a fingershyprint yet collectively legible by common sense On it the three aspects of the synaesthetic system-physical sensation motor reaction and psychical meaning-converge in signs and gestures comprising a mimetic language What this language speaks is anything but the concept Written on the bodys surface

41 Cited in Sir Gordon Gordon-Taylor and E W Walls Sir Charles StU Hu Life and Times (london E amp S Livingstone 1958) p 116 In his enthusiasm for the philosophical implications of his discovery Bell was careless about the physiological ones with the result that a French colleague preempted him in scientific publication It led to an unpleasant struggle between them as to who made the discovery first See Paul F Cranefield Tilt Wtry In and the Way Out FraRou Magtndu Charles BeU and the Roots of tilt SiRnal Nerves (Mt Kisco New York Futura Publishing 1974)

The Iifth Nerve From Sir Clwrles Bell On the Nerves J82J


as a convergence between the impress of the external world and the express of subjective feeling the language of this system threatens to betray the language of reason undermining its philosophical sovereignty

Hegel writing The Phenomenology of Mind in his Jena study in 1806 intershypreted the advancing army of Napoleon (whose cannons he could hear roaring in the distance) as the unwitting realization of Reason Sir Charles Bell who as a field doctor performing limb amputations was physically present a decade later at the Battle of Waterloo had a very different interpretation

It is a misfortune to have our sentiments at variance with the universal sentiment But there must ever be associated with the honours of Waterloo in my eyes the shocking signs of woe to my ears accents of intensity outcry from the manly breast interrupted forcible exshypressions from the dying-and noisome smells I must show you my note book [with sketches of those wounded] for it may convey an excuse for this excess of sentiment42

Bells excess of sentiment did not mean emotionalism He found his mind calm amidst such a variety of suffering43 And it would be grotesque to interpret sentiment in this context as having anything to do with taste The excess was one of perceptual acuity material awareness that ran out of the control of conscious will or intellection It was not a psychological category of sympathy or compassion of understanding the others point of view from the perspective of intentional meaning but rather physiological-a sensory mishymesis a response of the nervous system to external stimuli which was excessive because what he apprehended was unintentional in the sense that it resisted intellectual comprehension It could not be given meaning The category of rationality could be applied to these physiological perceptions only in the sense of rationalization44

42 Sir Charles Bell cited in Leo M Zimmerman and IIza Veith GTeat Ideas in the History of SUTgery 2nd edbull rev (New York Dover 1967) p 415 43 It was a strange thing to feel my clothes stiff with blood and my atms powerless with the exertion of using the knife and more extraordinary still to find my mind calm amidst such a variety of suffering But to give one of these objects access to your feelings was to allow yourself to be unmanned [sic1 for the performance of a duty It was less painful to look upon the whole than to contemplate one (cited in Zimmerman and Veith p414) 44 Later in his life Bell was to endow this resistance with at least a weak theological meaning as he described his aversion to animal vivisection even when he acknowledged its great value to the progress of the an of medicine and practice of surgery I should be writing a third paper on the Nerves but 1 cannot proceed without making some experiments which are so unpleasant to make that 1 defer them You may think me silly but I cannot perfectly convince myself that I am authorized in nature or religion to do these cruelties-for what-for anything else than a little egotism or self-aggrandizement and yet what are my experiments in comparison with those which are daily done and are done daily for nothing (Gordon-Taylor and Wails SiT ChaTe$ BeU p III) Note that this comment was made only after he had already dissected egbull the nerves of the face of a live ass

16 OCTOBER

VI

Walter Benjamins understanding of modern experience is neurological It centers on shock Here as seldom elsewhere Benjamin relies on a specific Freudian insight the idea that consciousness is a shield protecting the organism against stimuli-excessive energies45-from without by preventing their reshytention their impress as memory Benjamin writes The threat from these energies is one of shocks The more readily consciousness registers these shocks the less likely they are to have a traumatic effect46 Under extreme stress the ego employs consciousness as a buffer blocking the openness of the synaesthetic system47 thereby isolating present consciousness from past memory Without the depth of memory experience is impoverished48 The problem is that under conditions of modern shock-the daily shocks of the modern world-response to stimuli without thinking has become necessary for survival

Benjamin wanted to investigate the fruitfulness of Freuds hypothesis that consciousness parries shock by preventing it from penetrating deep enough to leave a permanent trace on memory by applying it to situations far removed from those which Freud had in mind49 Freud was concerned with war-neushyrosis the trauma of shell shock and catastrophic accident that plagued soldiers in World War I Benjamin claimed this battlefield experience of shock has become the norm in modern life50 Perceptions that once occasioned conscious reflection are now the source of shock-impulses that consciousness must parry In industrial production no less than modern warfare in street crowds and erotic encounters in amusement parks and gambling casinos shock is the very essence of modern experience The technologically altered environment exposes the human sensorium to physical shocks that have their correspondence in

45 Benjamin cites Freud For a living organism protection against stimuli is an almost more important function than the reception of stimuli the protective shield is equipped with its own store of energy (operating] against the effects of the excessive energies at work in the external world (Charles Baudelaire trans Harry Zohn [London Verso 1983] p 115) The text by Freud is Beyond the Pleasure Principle (1921) which returns to one of Freuds earliest schemata of the psyche the 1895 project which he described as a Psychology for Neurologists and which was published posthumously as Entwurf einer Psychologie The 1921 essay is the only text of Freud that Benjamin considers here 46 Benjamin Baudelaire p 115 47 The conception of the synaesthetic system is compatible with Freuds understanding of the ego as ultimately derived from bodily sensations chiefly from those springing from the surface of the body the place from which both external and internal perceptions may spring the ego may be thus regarded as a mental projection of the surface of the body (Freud The Ego and the Id [1923] trans Joan Rivere [New York W W Norton 1960] pp 15 and 16n) 48 Recollection is an elemental phenomenon which aims at giving us the time for organizing the reception ofstimuli which we initially lacked (Paul Valery cited in Benjamin Baudelaire p 116) 49 Benjamin Baudelaire p 114 50 Ibid p 116


psychic shock as Baudelaires poetry bears witness To record the breakdown of experience was the mission of Baudelaires poetry he placed the shock experience at the very center of his artistic work51

The motor responses of switching snapping the jolt in movement of a machine have their psychic counterpart in the sectioning of timeS2 into a sequence of repetitive moments without development The effect on the synshyaesthetic systemS is brutalizing Mimetic capacities rather than incorporating the outside world as a form of empowerment or innervation54 are used as a deflection against it The smile that appears automatically on passersby wards off contact a reflex that functions as a mimetic shock absorbers5

Nowhere is mimesis as a defensive reflex more apparent than in the factory where (Benjamin cites Marx) workers learn to coordinate their own movements to the uniform and unceasing motion of an automaton56 Indeshypendently of the workers volition the article being worked on comes within his range of action and moves away from him just as arbitrarily57 Exploitation is here to be understood as a cognitive category not an economic one The factory system injuring everyone of the human senses paralyzes the imagishynation of the worker58 His or her work is sealed off from experience memory is replaced by conditioned response learning by drill skill by repetition practice counts for nothing59

Perception becomes experience only when it connects with sense-memories of the past but for the protective eye that wards off impressions there is no

51 Ibid pp 139 llS-l7 Baudelaire speaks of a man who plunges into the crowd as into a reservoir of electric energy Circumscribing the experience of shock he calls this a ltaleiMscope equipped with consciousness (p 132) 52 Ibid p 139 53 Benjamin uses the term synaesthesia here in connection with the theory of correspondences (ibid p 139) He may have been aware that the term is used in physiology to describe a sensation in one part of the body when another part is stimulated and in psychology to describe when a sense stimulus (eg color) evokes another sense (eg smell) My use of synaesthetic is dose to these it identifies the mimetic synchrony between outer stimulus (perception) and inner stimulus (bodily sensations including sense-memories) as the crucial element of aesthetic cognition 54 Innervation is Benjamins term for a mimetic reception of the external world one that is empowering in contrast to a defensive mimetic adaptation that protects at the price of paralyzing the organism robbing it of its capacity of imagination and therefore of active response 55 Benjamin Baudelaire p 133 56 Ibid Benjamin continues (quoting Capital) Every kind of capitalist production has this in common ( J that it is not the workman that employs the instruments of labor but the instruments of labor that employ the workman But it is only in the factory system that this inversion for the first time acquires technical and palpable reality (p 132) 57 Ibidbull p 133 58 In the 1844 manuscripts Marx notes The (JfflIing of the five senses is a labor of the entire history of the world down to the present For Marx sensory life is real man is to be affirmed in the active world not only in the act of thinking but with all his senses In equating reality with sensory life it is the materialist Marx who aestheticizes politics in the authentic meaning of the term Benjamin is close to Marx here 59 Benjamin Baudelaire p 133

18 OCTOBER

daydreaming surrender to faraway things60 Being cheated out of experience has become the general state51 as the synaesthetic system is marshaled to parry technological stimuli in order to protect both the body from the trauma of accident and the psyche from the trauma of perceptual shock As a result the system reverses its role Its goal is to numb the organism to deaden the senses to repress memory the cognitive system of synaesthetics has become rather one of anaesthetics In this situation of crisis in perception it is no longer a question of educating the crude ear to hear music but of giving it back hearing It is no longer a question of trainiqg the eye to see beauty but of restoring perceptibility52

The technical apparatus of the camera incapable of returning our gaze catches the deadness of the eyes that confront the machine-eyes that have lost their ability to look6lJ Of course the eyes still see Bombarded with fragshymentary impressions they see too much-and register nothing Thus the sishymultaneity of overstimulation and numbness is characteristic of the new synaesthetic organization as anaesthetics The dialectical reversal whereby aesshythetics changes from a cognitive mode of being in touch with reality to a way of blocking out reality destroys the human organisms power to respond politshyicaUyeven when self-preservation is at stake Someone who is past experiencshying is no longer capable of telling proven friend from mortal enemy 64

VII

Anaesthetics became an elaborate technics in the latter part of the nineshyteenth century Whereas the bodys self-anaesthetizing defenses are largely inshyvoluntary these methods involved conscious intentional manipulation of the synaesthetic system To the already-existing Enlightenment narcotic forms of coffee tobacco tea and spirits there was added a vast arsenal of drugs and therapeutic practices from opium ether and cocaine to hypnosis hydrothershyapy and electric shock

Anaesthetic techniques were prescribed by doctors against the disease of

60 Ibid p 151 Benjamins observation is in total accord with neurological research The neuro1ogist Frederick Metder reports a contradiction between the reflective calm necessary to be creative (and to inwmt machines) and the destruction of this calm milieu by the very machines and increased productivity which the reflective mind creates He notes that you have merely to be premat to drive a car whereas creative reflection is absent-minded (Culture and 1M Structural Ewlulion of1M Neural System [New York The American Museum of Natural History 1956) p 51) 61 Benjamin Bautklaire p IS7 62 Ibid pp 147-48 In this context film reconstitutes experience establishing perception in the form of shocks as its formal principle (p 182) How a film is constructed whether it breaks through the numbing shield of consciousness or merely provides a driU for the strength of its defenses becomes a matter of central political significance 6S Ibidbull pp 147-49 64 Ibidbull p 14S


neurasthenia identified in 1869 as a pathological construct65 Striking in nineteenth-century descriptions of the effects of neurasthenia is the disintegrashytion of the capacity for experience-precisely as in Benjamins account of shock The dominant metaphors for the disease reflect this shattered nerves nershyvous breakdown going to pieces fragmentation of the psyche The disshyorder was caused by excess of stimulation (sthenia) and the incapacity to react to same (asthenia) Neurasthenia could be brought about by overwork the wear and tear of modern life the physical trauma of a railroad acccident modern civilizations ever-growing tax upon the brain an~ its tributaries the morbid ill effects attributed to the prevalence of the factory system66

Remedies for neuraesthenia might include hot baths or a trip to the seashore but the most common treatment was drugs The chief of all drugs used for nervous exhaustion was opium because of its twofold impact it excites and stimulates for a short time the brain-cells and then leaves them in a state of tranquility which is best adapted to their nutrition and repair67 Opiates were the leading childrens drug throughout the nineteenth century68 Mothers working in factories drugged their children as a form of day-care Anaesthetics were prescribed as sleeping aids for insomnia and tranquilizers for the insane69 Procurement of opiates was unregulated patent medicines (nerve tonics and painkillers of every son) were money-making transnational comshymodities traded and sold free of governmental control7deg Cocaine first exshytracted from Peruvian coca in 1859 by the European Alben Niemann became widely used by the end of the century71 Hypodermic syringes were available for subcutaneous injections beginning in the 1860s72

The use of anaesthetics in medical surgery dates not accidentally73 from

65 The term neurasthenia was publicized by the New York doctor George Miller Beard By the 1880s it had taken a prominent place in European discussions Beard himself suffered from nervous debilitation and gave himself electrotherapy (shocks) to replenish exhausted supplies of nerve force (janet Oppenheim Sh4ueTed NtnIIIs Doctors Patients and Deprusion in VictoritJn England [New York Oxford University Press 1991] p 120) 66 Cited in Oppenheim Sh4ueTed NtnIIIs pp 44 87 95 96 101 105 67 Thomas Dowse (18805) cited in Oppenheim pp 114-15 68 Oppenheim Sh4ueTtd Nerves p 113 69 Martin S Pemick A Calctdw of Suffning Pain Proftssionalism and A11tUsthesia in NinetetnthshyCmtury Amtrica (New York Columbia University Press 1985) p 83 70 Controls (eg bull Englands Pharmacy and Poison Act of 1908) were not passed until the twentieth century 71 Owen H Wangen steen and Sarah D Wangensteen Tht Rist of Surgtry From Empiric Craft to Scientific Disciplw (Minneapolis University of Minnesota Press 1978) 72 Oppenheim Sh4ueTed NtnIIIs p 114 73 I have not found reference to Charles Bells practice during surgery but his French counshyterpart Larry surgeon for Napoleons army froze the limbs to be amputated with ice or knocked the patient unconscious Larry was willing to experiment with nitrous oxide which was known in his time but the suggestion was considered by the majority of the French Royal Academy to border on the criminal (Frederick Prescott Tht Control of Pain [London The English Universities Press 1964] pp 18-28)

REMEDY Ovtr

Late-nineteenth-century advertisement for patent medicine

I bullbull

Caricature of nitrous oxide (ether) frolics 1808


this same period of manipulative experimentation with the elements of the synaesthetic system Ether frolics the nineteenth-century version of glueshysniffing was a party game in which laughing gas (nitrous oxide) was inhaled producing voluptuous sensations dazzling visible impressions a sense of tangible extension highly pleasurable in every limb entrancing visions a world of new sensations a new universe composed of impressions ideas pleasures and pain74 It was not until mid-century that the practical implicashytions for surgery were developed It happened in the United States when independently medical students in Georgia and Massachusetts participated in these frolics A Georgia surgeon Crawford W Long noted that those bruised during the celebrations felt no pain At a party in Massachusetts medical students gave ether to rats in high enough doses to make them immobile producing total insensibility Crawford Long used anaesthetics successfully in operations in 1842 In 1844 a Hartford Connecticut dentist performed tooth extractions with nitrous oxide In 1846-in a much more sober legitimating atmosphere than the ether frolics-the first public demonstration of general anaesthesia was given at Massachusetts General Hospital75 whence this wonshyderful discovery76 spread rapidly to Europe

VIII

It was not uncommon in the nineteenth century for surgeons to become drug addicts77 Freuds self-experimentation with cocaine is well known Elizashybeth Barrett Browning was a morphinist from late youth Samuel Coleridge began his life-long addiction at the age of twenty-four Charles Baudelaire used opium By mid-nineteenth century habitual drug-taking was rampant among the poor and spreading among the affluent even among royalty 78

Drug addiction is characteristic of modernity It is the correlate and counshyterpart of shock The social problem of drug addiction however is not the same as the (neuro)psychological problem for a drug-free unbuffered adapshytation to shock can prove fatal79 But the cognitive (hence political) problem

74 Effects of nitrous oxide reported in Prescott p 19 75 See Wangensteen and Wangensteen pp 277-79 76 Prescott p 28 Acceptance of anesthetics was not without resistance Cultural encoding of the meaning of pain included a strong tradition that held pain was natural or God-intended (especially in childbirth) and beneficial to healing Resistance to the insensibility of general anaesshythetics was also political Elizabeth Cady Stanton objected to a womans surrendering her conshysciousness and body to a male doctor (pernick pp 16-61) Long after 1846 alcoholic stupor remained an acceptable surgical anodyne (ibid bull p 178) 77 Wangensteen and Wangensteen Tiu Rise of Surgery p 293 78 Oppenheim Shattered Nerves p 113 79 See Hans Selye Tiu Stress of Life 2nd ed rev (New York McGraw-Hill 1976) p 307 In an article published the same year as Benjamins Artwork essay (1936) Selye first defined Stress Syndrome as a Disease of Adaptation that is an inability of the organism to meet a (nonspecific)

22 OCTOBER

lies still elsewhere The experience of intoxication is not limited to drug-induced biochemical transformations Beginning in the nineteenth century a narcotic was made out of reality itself

The key word for this development is phantasmagoria The term origishynated in England in 1802 as the name of an exhibition of optical illusions produced by magic lanterns It describes an appearance of reality that tricks the senses through technical manipulation And as new technologies multiplied in the nineteenth century so did the potential for phantasmagoric effects so

In the bourgeois interiors of the nineteenth century furnishings provided a phantasmagoria of textures tones and sensual pleasure that immersed the home-dweller in a total environment a privatized fantasy world that functioned as a protective shield for the senses and sensibilities of this new ruling class In the Passagen-Werk Benjamin documents the spread of phantasmagoric forms to public space the Paris shopping arcades where the rows of shop windows created a phantasmagoria of commodities on display panoramas and dioramas that engulfed the viewer in a simulated total environment-in-miniature and the World Fairs which expanded this phantasmagoric principle to areas the size of small cities These nineteenth-century forms are the precursors of todays shopshyping malls theme parks and video arcades as well as the totally controlled environments of airplanes (where one sits plugged in to sight and sound and food service) the phenomenon of the tourist bubble (where the travelers experiences are all monitored and controlled in advance) the individualized audiosensory environment of a walkman the visual phantasmagoria of adshyvertising the tactile sensorium of a gymnasium full of Nautilus equipment

Phantasmagorias are a technoaesthetics The perceptions they provide are real enough-their impact upon the senses and nerves is still natural from a neurophysical point of view But their social function is in each case compenshysatory The goal is manipulation of the synaesthetic system by control of envishyronmental stimuli It has the effect of anaesthetizing the organism not through numbing but through flooding the senses These simulated sensoria alter conshysciousness much like a drug but they do so through sensory distraction rather

demand made on it with adequate adaptive reactions Stress was the common denominator of all adaptative reactions in the body It went through three phases if the external demand continued unabated alarm reaction (general resistance to the demand) adaptation (an attempt successful in the short-run to coexist) and finally exhaustion resulting in passivity (lack of resistance and possibly death) 80 Technology thus develops with a double function On the one hand it extends the human senses increasing the acuity of perception and forces the universe to open itself up to penetration by the human sensory apparatus On the other hand precisely because this technological extension leaves the senses open to exposure technology doubles back on the senses as protection in the form of illusion taking over the role of the ego in order to provide defensive insulation The development of the machine as tool has its correlation in the development of the machine as armor (see below) It follows that the synaesthetic system is nOl a constant in history It extends its scope and it is through technology that this extension occurs

Franz Slwrbina View of the Seine and Paris at Night 190J

than chemical alteration and-most significantly-their effects are experienced collectively rather than individually Everyone sees the same altered world experiences the same total environment As a result unlike with drugs the phantasmagoria assumes the position of objective fact Whereas drug addicts confront a society that challenges the reality of their altered perception the intoxication of phantasmagoria itself becomes the social norm Sensory addiction to a compensatory reality becomes a means of social control

The role of art in this development is ambivalent because under these conditions the definition of art as a sensual experience that distinguishes itself precisely by its separation from reality becomes difficult to sustain Much of art enters into the phantasmagoric field as entertainment as part of the commodity world The effects of phantasmagoria exist on multiple levels as is visible in a turn-of-the-century painting by Franz Skarbina11 The view is of the World Fair in Paris in 190 I depicted in the doubly illusory form provided by lighting at night The painting is a Stimmungsbild a mood-painting a genre

81 See John Czaplickas discussion of this painting in Pictures of a City at Work Berlin circa 1890-1930 Visual Reflections on Social Structures and Technology in the Modern Urban Conshystruct Berlin Culture and MetTampf1olis eds Charles W Haxthausen and Heidrun Suhr (Minneapolis University of Minnesota Press 1990) pp 12-16 I am grateful to the author for pointing out the relevance of the Stimmungsbild for the discussion at hand

24 OCTOBER

then in fashion that aimed at depicting an atmosphere or mood more than a subject Despite the depth of the view visual pleasure is provided by the luminous surface of the painting that shimmers over the scene like a veil john Czaplicka writes The city is reduced to a mood of the beholder The experience of place is more emotional than rational There is subtle denial of the city as artifice and a subtle relinquishing of humanitys responsibility for having made this environment82

Benjamin describes the f1aneur as self-trained in this capacity of distancing oneself by turning reality into a phantasmagoria rather than being caught up in the crowd he slows his pace and observes it making a pattern out of its surface He sees the crowd as a reflection of his dream mood an intoxication for his senses

The sense of sight was privileged in this phantasmagoric sensorium of modernity But sight was not exclusively affected Perfumeries burgeoned in the nineteenth century their products overpowering the olfactory sense of a population already besieged by the smells of the city8s Zolas novel Le Bonheur des Dames describes the phantasmagoria of the department store as an orgy of tactile eroticism where women felt their way by touch through the rows of counters heaped with textiles and clothing In regard to taste Parisian gustatory refinements had already reached an exquisite level in post-Revolutionary France as former cooks for the nobility sought restaurant employment It is significant for the anaesthetic effects of these experiences that the singling out of anyone sense for intense stimulus has the effect of numbing the rest84

The most monumental artistic attempt to create a total environment was Richard Wagners design for music drama as a Gesammtlrunstwerk (total artwork) in which poetry music and theater were combined in order to create as Adorno writes an intoxicating brew (surmounting the uneven development of the senses and reuniting them)8gt Wagnerian music drama floods the senses and fuses them as a consoling phantasmagoria in a permanent invitation to intoxication as a form of oceanic regression86 It is the perfection of the illusion that the work of art is reality sui generis87 Like Nietzsche and subshysequently Art Nouveau which he anticipates in many respects [Wagner] would like single-handed to will an aesthetic totality into being casting a magic spell

82 Ibid p 15 83 See Benjamin The recognition of a scent deeply drugs the sense of time (Baudeillire p 143) 84 See Marshall McLuhan Undnstanding Media The Extmsiom ofMan (New York McGraw-Hili 1964) p 53 This specialization of sense stimulation causes an uneven development of the senses they are transformed within industrial societies at different rates 85 Theodor Adorno In Search of Wagner trans Rodney Livingstone (London NLB 1981) p 100 Adorno makes the point that in advanced bourgeois civilization every organ of sense apprehends a different world (p 104) 86 Ibid pp 87 100 87 Ibid p 85


and with defiant unconcern about the absence of the social conditions necessary for its survival88 It is this pseudo-totalization that for Adorno makes Wagshynerian opera a phantasmagoria Its unity is superimposed Whereas under conditions of modernity in the contingent experience of the individual outshyside the opera house the separate senses do not unite into a unified percepshytion here disparate procedures are simply aggregated in such a way as to make them appear collectively binding89 In lieu of internal musical logic the Wagnerian opera evokes a surface unity of style one that overwhelms by not pausing for breath90 Unity is mere duplication which substitutes for protest91 the music repeats what the words have already said the musical motifs recur like an advertising theme intoxication the ecstasy that might have affirmed sensuality is reduced to surface sensation while the content of the dramas is lifes negation the action culminates in the decision to die92

Wagners Gesammtkunstwerk intimately related to the disenchantment of the world93 is an attempt to produce a totalizing metaphysics instrumentally by means of every technological means at its disposal This is true of dramatic representation as well as musical style At Bayreuth the orchestra-the means of production of the musical effects-is hidden from the public by constructing the pit below the audiences line of vision Supposedly integrating the individual arts the performance of Wagners operas ends up by achieving a division of labor unprecedented in the history of music94

Marx made the term phantasmagoria famous using it to describe the world of commodities that in their mere visible presence conceal every trace of the labor that produced them They veil the production process and-like mood pictures-encourage their beholders to identify them with subjective fantasies and dreams Adorno comments on Marxs theory of commodities that their phantasmagoria mirrors subjectivity by confronting the subject with the product of its own labor but in such a way that the labor that has gone into it is no longer identifiable rather the dreamer encounters his [her] own image impotently95 Adorno argues that the deceptive illusion of Wagners art is

SSt Ibid p 101 The basic idea is one of totality the Ring attempts without much ado nothing less than the encapsulation of the world process as a whole (ibid) 89 Ibid p 102 90 Ibid The style becomes the sum of all the stimuli registered by the totality of the senses 91 Ibid p 112 The aesthetics of duplication is substituted for protest a mere amplification of subjective expression that is nullified by its very vehemence 92 Ibid pp 102-103 93 Ibid p 107 94 Ibid p 109 Adorno cites evidence from Wagners immediate circle On 23 March 1890 that is to say long before the invention of the cinema Chamberlain wrote to Cosima about Liszts Dante symphony which can stand here for the whole tendency Perform this symphony in a darkened room with a sunken orchestra and show pictures moving past in the background-and you will see how all the Levis and all the cold neighbors of today whose unfeeling natures give such pain to a poor heart will all faU into ecstasy (p 107) 95 Ibidbull p91

Swimming machines for Das Rheingold

analogous9fi The task of his music is to hide the alienation and fragmentation the loneliness and the sensual impoverishment of modern existence that was the material out of which it is composed the task of [Wagners] music is to warm up the alienated and reified relations of man and make them sound as if they were still human97 Wagner himself speaks of healing up the wounds with which the anatomical scalpel has gashed the body of speech9H

96 Wagners oeuvre resembled the consumer goods of the nineteenth century which knew no greater ambition than to conceal every sign of the work that went into them perhaps because any such traces reminded people too vehemently of the appropriation of the labor of others of an injustice that could still be felt (ibid p 83) 97 Ibid p 100 98 Cited in ibid p 89 In this context we can understand Benjamins praise of Baudelaire (a


IX

The factory was the work-world counterpart of the opera house-a kind of counter-phantasmagoria that was based on the principle of fragmentation rather than the illusion of wholeness Marxs Capital (written in the 1860s and thus a part of the same era as Wagners operas) describes the factory as a total environment

Every organ of sense is injured in an equal degree by artificial eleshyvation of temperature by the dust-laden atmosphere by the deafshyening noise not to mention danger to life and limb among the thickly crowded machinery which with the regularity of the seasons issues its list of the killed and the wounded in the industrial batde99

We have learned from recent writing on social history that doctors were unishyformly horrified by the grisly body count of the industrial revolutionloo The rates of injuries due to factory and railroad accidents in the nineteenth century made surgical wards look like field hospitals At Massachusetts General Hospital in mid-century (after introduction of general anaesthetics) nearly seven percent of all patients admitted received amputations IOI As most hospital patients were charity cases this group was largely from the lower class 102 Threatened bodies shattered limbs physical catastrophe-these realities of modernity were the underside of the technical aesthetics of phantasmagorias as total environments of bodily comfort The surgeon whose task it was literally to piece together the casualities of industrialism achieved a new social prominence The medical practice was professionalized in the mid-nineteenth century103 and doctors became prototypical of a new elite of technical experts

Anaesthesia was central to this development For it was not only the patient who was relieved from pain by anaesthesia The effect was as profound upon the surgeon A deliberate effort to desensitize oneself from the experience of

contemporary of both Wagner and Marx) for confronting modern shock head-on and for being able to record in his poetry precisely the fragmented and jarring even painful sensuality of modern experience in a way that pierces through the phantasmagoric veil He writes that the possible establishment of proof that [Baudelaires] poetry transcribes reveries experienced under hashish in no way invalidates this interpretation ([)as PassagenWerA vol 5 Gesammelte Schriftm ed Rolf Tiedemann [Frankfurt aM Suhrkamp Verlag 1992] p 71) (For Benjamins own experiments with hashish see Gesammelte Schriftm voL 6) Indeed in an era of sensory numbing as a cognitive defense Benjamin claimed that insight into the truth of modern experience was seldom to be had in a sober state 99 Marx Capital vol 1 ch 15 section 4 100 Pernick A Caktdus of Suffering p 218 101 Ibid p 211 102 Until the discovery of the importance of antiseptics upper-class operations were performed at home anaesthesia being administered with a bottle and a rag (ibid p 223) 103 The American Medical Association was established in mid-century Prior to this there was no regulation as to who was authorized to perform surgery

28 OCTOBER

the pain of another was no longer necessary Whereas surgeons earlier had to train themselves to repress empathic identification with the suffering patient now they had only to confront an inert insensate mass that they could tinker with without emotional involvement

These developments entailed a cultural transformation of medicine-and of the discourse of the body generally-as is exemplified clearly in the case of limb amputations In 1639 the British naval surgeon John Woodall advised prayer before the lamentable surgery of amputation For it is no small presumption to Dismember the Image of GodI04 In 1806 (the era of Charles Bell) the surgeons attitude evoked Enlightenment themes of Stoicism the glorification of reason and the sanctity of individual life But with the introshyduction of general anaesthesia the American Journal of Medical Sciences could report in 1852 that it was very gratifying to the operator and to the spectators that the patient lies a tranquil passive subject instead of struggling and perhaps uttering piteous cries and moans while the knife is at worklo5 The control provided to the surgeon by a tranquilly pliant patient allowed the operation to proceed with unprecedented technical thoroughness and all convenient deliberationI06 Of course the point is in no way to criticize surgical advances Rather it is to document a transformation in perception the implications of which far surpassed the scene of the surgical operation

Phenomenology uses the term kyle undifferentiated brute matter-to describe that which is perceived but not intended Husserls example is Durers engraving on wood of the knight on horseback Although the wood is perceived along with the knights image it is not the meaning of the perception If you are asked what do you see you will say a knight (ie the surface image) not a piece of wood The material stuff disappears behind the intent or meaning of the image 107 Husserl the founder of modern phenomenology was writing at the turn of the century the era when professionalization technical expertise division of labor and the rationalization of procedures were lTansforming social practices Urban-industrial popUlations began to be perceived as themselves a mass-undifferentiated potentially dangerous a collective body that needed to be controlled and shaped into a meaningful form In one sense this was a continuation of the autotelic myth of creation ex nikiw wherein man transshyforms material nature by shaping it to his will New were the theme of the social collectivity and the division of labor to which the creative process now submitshyted

For Kant the domination of nature was internalized the subjective will

104 Cited in Wangensteen and Wangensteen The Rise of Surgery p 181 105 Cited in Pernick A Calculus of Suffering p 83 106 Cited in ibid p 83 107 I discuss the connection between Husserls conception and early cinema in Anthony Vidler ed Territorial Mths (Princeton Princeton University Press 1992)

Fr()ntifpiece from Sir Charlis Bell The Principles or Surgery 1806 Wh() would lose for fear of pain this intellictual being

the disciplined material body and the autonomous self that was produced as a result were all within the (same) individual In early-modern autogenesis the autonomous subject produced himself But by the end of the nineteenth century these functions were divided the self-made man was entrepreneur of a large corporation the warrior was general of a technologically sophisticated war machine the ruling prince was head of an expanding bureaucracy even the social revolutionary had become the leader and shaper of a disciplined massshyparty organization

Technology affected the social imaginary The new theories of Herbert Spencer and Emile Durkheim perceived society as an organism literally a body politic in which the social practices of institutions (rather than as in premodern Europe the social ranks of individuals) performed the various organ funcshy

OCTOBER30

tionsIOS Labor specialization rationalization and integration of social functions created a techno-body of society and it was imagined to be as insensate to pain as the individual body under general anaesthetics so that any number of opshyerations could be performed upon the social body without needing to concern oneself lest the patient-society itself-Uutter piteous cries and moans What happened to perception under these circumstances was a tripartite splitting of experience into agency (the operating surgeon) the object as hyle (the docile body of the patient) and the observer (who perceives and acknowledges the accomplished result) These were positional differences not ontological ones and they changed the nature of social representation Listen to Husserls deshyscription of experience in which this tripartite division is evident even in one individual the philosopher himself Husserl writes in Ideen II

If I cut my finger with a knife then a physical body is split by the driving into it of a wedge the fluid contained in it trickles out etc Likewise the physical thing my Body is heated or cooled through

108 Spencer wrote in 1851 We commonly enough compare a nation to a living organism We speak of the body politic of the function of its several parts of its growth and of its diseases as though it were a creature But we usually employ these expressions as metaphors linle suspecting how dose is the analogy and how far it will bear carrying out So completely however is a society organized upon the same system as an individual being that we may almost say there is something more than analogy between them (cited in Robert M Young Mind Brain and AdapltUion in the Ninelemth Cenlury 2nd ed [New York Oxford University Press 1990) p 160)

William T Morton administering anesthesia at the Mrusachwetts General Hospital October 16 1846


contact with hot or cold bodies it can become electrically charged through contact with an electric current it assumes different colors under changing illumination and one can elicit noises from it by striking it 109

This separation of the elements of synaesthetic experience would have been inconceivable in a text by Kant Husserls description is a technical observation in which the bodily experience is split from the cognitive one and the experience of agency is again split from both of these An uncanny sense of self-alienation results from such perceptual splitting Something similar happened at this time in the operating room

The Enlightenment practice of performing surgical procedures in an amshyphitheater (whose grandeur rivaled the Wagnerian stage) went through a radical alteration with the introduction of general anaesthetics The initial impact was to heighten the theatrical effect as (we have already noted) neither surgeon nor audience had to bother with the feelings of the insensate patient Here is a description of an early amputation under general anaesthesia

The Catlin glittering for a moment above the head of the operator was plunged through the limb and with one artistic sweep made the

109 Edmund Husserl Ideas pmtJiJling to a PU PIamorunolo alld to a P~al PllilosoJ1la1 vol I trans R Rojcewicz and A Schuwer (Boston Kluwer Academic Publishers 1989) p 168

Diagram of an opntJting tMattrr c 1890

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flaps or completed a circular amputation After several aerial gyrashytions the saw severed the bone as if driven by electricity The fall of the amputated part was greeted with tumultuous applause by the excited students The operator acknowledged the compliment with a formal boWIIO

A radical alteration occurred at the end of the century when discoveries in germ theory and antiseptics transformed the operating room from theatrical stage into a tile-and-marble scrubbed-down sterilized environment At the Tenth International Medical Congress in 1890 J Baladin of St Petersburg described the first use of a glass partition to separate students and visitors from the operating arena III The glass window became a projection screen a series of mirrors provided an informative image of the procedure Here the tripartite division of perceptual perspective-agent matter and observer-paralleled the brand new contemporary experience of the cinema In the Artwork essay Walter Benjamin discusses the surgeon and cameraman (as opposed to the magician and painter) The operations of both surgeon and cameraman are nonauratic they penetrate the human being in contrast the magician and painter confront the other person intersubjectively as Benjamin writes man to man112

x

The German writer Ernst Junger several times wounded in World War I wrote afterwards that sacrifices to technological destruction-not only war casualties but industrial and traffic accidents as well-now occurred with statisshytical predictability II They had become accepted as a self-understood feature of existence thereby causing the Worker as the new modem type to develop a Second Consciousness This Second and colder Consciousness is indicated in the ever-more sharply developed capacity to see oneself as an object114 Whereas the self-reflection characteristic of psychology of the old style took as its subject matter the sensitive human being this Second Conshy

110 Cited in Wangensteen and Wangensteen The Rut of Surgery p 462 Ill Ibid p 466 112 Benjamin IUuminations p 233 113 As part of the professionalization of medicine and of the depersonalization of the patient statistics set up norms of surgical practice and by the end of the nineteenth century due to such statistical knowledge health insurance companies became a historical possibility They allowed human suffering to be calculated Whoever dies is unimportant it is a question of ratio between accidents and the companys liabilities (Theodor W Adorno and Max Horkheimer Dialectic of Enligllmmmt trans John Cumming (London Verso 1979) p 84 114 Ernst Junger Uber den Schmerz (1932) Samdiche Wu vol 7 Essays I BlltTachtvngm ZUT Zilil (Stuttgart Klett-Cotta 1980) p 181 Partial translation in Christopher Philips ed Pwwgraphy in the Modem Em (New York The Metropolitan Museum of Art 1989)


sciousness is directed at a being who stands outside the zone of painIIS Junger connects this changed perspective with photography that artificial eye which arrests the bullet in flight just as it does the human being at the instant of being torn to pieces by an explosion116 The powerfully prosthetic sense organs of technology are the new ego of a transformed synaesthetic system Now they provide the porous surface between inner and outer both perceptual organ and mechanism of defense Technology as a tool and a weapon extends human power-at the same time intensifying the vulnerability of what Benjamin called the tiny fragile human body1I7-and thereby produces a counter-need to use technology as a protective shield against the colder order that it creates Junger writes that military uniforms have always had a protective character of defense but now Technology is our uniform

It is the technological order itself that great mirror in which the growing objectifications of our life appear most dearly and which is sealed against the dutch of pain in a special way We however stand far too deeply in the process to view this This is all the more the case as the comfort-character [read phantasmagoric funcshytion] of our technology merges ever more unequivocably with its characteristic of instrumental power lIS

In the great mirror of technology the image that returns is displaced reflected onto a different plane where one sees oneself as a physical body divorced from sensory vulnerability-a statistical body the behavior ofwhich ca1 be calculated a performing body actions of which can be measured up against the norm a virtual body one that can endure the shocks of modernity without pain As Junger writes It almost seems as if the human being possessed a striving to

create a space in which pain can be regarded as an illusion119 We have seen that Adorno identified Art Nouveau as a continuation of

Wagners commodity-like phantasmagoria Again surface unity provided the phantasmagoric effect Just before the war this movement denied the experishyence of fragmentation by representing the body as an ornamental surface as if reflected off the inside of technologyS protective shield The outbreak of war made such denial no longer possible The Berlin Dada Manifesto of 1918

115 Ibid 116 Ibid p 182 117 He writes in The Storyteller about the impoverishment of experience due to the First World War A generation that had gone to school on a horse-drawn streetcar now stood under the open sky in a countryside in which nothing remained unchanged but the clouds and beneath these douds in a field of force or destructive torrents and explosions was the tiny fragile human body (Benjamin Illuminations p 84) 118 Ibid p 174 119 Junger p 184

Fram EmIt Junger The Transti)rmed World 19JJ Tlte lace at the earth city country

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announced The highest art will be the one which in its conscious content presents the thousand-fold problems of the day the art which has been visibly shattered by the explosions of last week which is forever trying to collect its limbs after yesterdays crash120 It is possible to read the portraits of Expresshysionist artists as bearing on the surface of the face unarmored and exposed the material impress of this technological shattering (This is totally opposed to the fascist interpretation of Expressionism as degenerate art which ontologizes the surface appearance and reduces history to biology) The vigorous postwar movement of photomontage also made the fragmented body its stuff and subshystance 121 But the effect was to piece the fragments together again in images that appear impervious to pain For example in Hannah HOchs 1926 montage Monument 1 Vanity the image is unified with precision creating a coherent (if disturbing) surface-yet without the superimposed unity of the phantasmashygoric

120 Cited in Robert Hughes TIlL Siwek of the New rev ed (New York Alfred A Knopf 1991) p68 121 Benjamin speaks positively in the Baudelaire essay of cinematic montage as turning fragshymentation into a constructive principle


At the same time surface pattern as an abstract representation of reason coherence and order became the dominant form of depicting the social body that technology had created-and that in fact could not be perceived otherwise In 1933 Junger wrote the introduction to a book of photographs in which German cities and fields form a surface design of abstract orderliness that is the hallmark of instrumental technology The same aesthetics is visible in the Soviet plan its organization chart of 1924 shows the entire society from the perspective of centralized power in terms of its productive units-from steel 10

matchsticks The aesthetics of the surface in these images gives back to the observer a

reassuring perception of the rationality of the whole of the social body which when viewed from his or her own particular body is perceived as a threat to wholeness And yet if the individual does find a point of view from which it can see itself as whole the social techno-body disappears from view In fascism (and this is key to fascist aesthetics) this dilemma of perception is surmounted by a phantasmagoria of the individual as part of a crowd that itself forms an integral whole-a mass ornament to use Siegfried Kracauers term that pleases as an aesthetics of the surface a deindividualized formal and regular pattern-much like the Soviet plan The Urform of this aesthetics is already present in Wagners operas in the staging of the chorus which anticipates the crowds salute to Hitler But lest we forget that fascism is not itself responsible for the transformed perception musical productions of the 1930s used this same design motif (Hitler was an aficionado of American musicals)

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Soviet organization plan J92J

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Performance of Wagner in Bayreuth in 1930

Hitler in the ReichJtag


XI

We are-by a long detour-back to Benjamins concerns at the end of the Artwork essay the crisis in cognitive experience caused by the alienation of the senses that makes it possible for humanity to view its own destruction with enjoyment Recall that this essay was first published in 1936 That same year Jacques Lacan traveled to Marienbad to deliver a paper to the International Psychoanalytic Association that first formulated his theory of the mirror stage122 It described the moment when the infant of six to eighteen months triumphantly recognizes its mirror image and identifies with it as an imaginary bodily unity This narcissistic experience of the self as a specular reflection is one of mis(re)cognition The subject identifies with the image as the form (Gestalt) of the ego in a way that conceals its own lack It leads retroactively to a fantasy of the body-in-pieces (corps morcele) Hal Foster has situated this theory in the historical context of early fascism and pointed out the personal connections between Lacan and Surrealist artists who made the fragmented body their theme 123 I believe one can push the significance of this contextualshyization very far so that the mirror stage can be read as a theory of fascism

The experience Lacan describes may (or may not) be a universal stage in developmental psychology but its importance psychoanalytically comes only after-the-fact as deferred action (Nachtriiglichkeit) when the recollection of this infant fantasy is triggered in the memory of the adult by something in his or her present situation Thus the significance of Lacans theory emerges only in the historical context of modernity as precisely the experience of the fragile body and the dangers to it of fragmentation that replicates the trauma of the original infantile event (the fantasy of the corps morcell) Lacan himself recogshynized the historical specificity of narcissistic disorders commenting that Freuds major paper on narcissism not accidentally dates from the beginning of the 1914 war and it is quite moving to think that it was at that time that Freud was developing such a constTUction124

The day after Lacan delivered his paper in Marienbad he deserted the Congress and took the train to Berlin in order to watch the Olympic Games being held there 125 In a note to the Artwork essay Benjamin commented on these modern Olympics which he said differed from their ancient prototypes inasmuch as they were less a contest than a proceeding of exact technological

122 In fact this paper was never published A different version reported here appeared in 1949 123 See Foster Armor Fou October 57 (Spring 1991) This section is strongly indebted to Fosters insights 124 The Seminars ofJacqtUs LAcan Book I Freuds Papers on Technique 1953-54 ed Jacques-Alain Miner and trans John Forrester (New York W W Norton Be Company 1988) p 118 125 See David Macey lAcan in Contexts (New York Verso 1988) for an account of Lacans MarienbadBerlin trip

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measurement a form of test rather than competition 126 Drawing on Junger Foster points out that fascism displayed the physical body as a kind of armor against fragmentation and also against pain The armored mechanized body with its galvanized surface and metallic sharp-angled face provides the illusion of invulnerability It is the body viewed from the point of view of the second consciousness described by Junger as numbed against feeling (The word narcissism comes from the same root as narcotic) But if fascism thrived on the representation of the body-as-armor it was not its only aesthetic form relevant to this problematic

XII

There are two self-definitions of fascism that in closing I would like to consider The first is a description by Joseph Goebbels in a letter of 1933 We who shape modern German politics feel ourselves to be artistic people entrusted with the great responsibility of forming out of the raw material of the masses a solid well-wrought structure of a VolA127 This is the technologized version of the myth of autogenesis with its division between the agent (here the fascist leaders) and the mass (the undifferentiated hyle acted upon) We will remember that this division is tripartite There is as well the observer who knows through observation It was the genius of fascist propaganda to give to the masses a double role to be observer as well as the inert mass being formed and shaped And yet due to a displacement of the place of pain due to a consequent mis(recognition the mass-as-audience remains somehow undisturbed by the spectacle of its own manipulation-much like Husserl cutting open his finger In Leni Riefenstahls 1935 film Triumph of the Will (of which Benjamin writing the Artwork essay was surely aware) the mobilized masses fill the grounds of the Nuremberg stadium and the cinema screen so that the surface patterns provide a pleasing design of the whole letting the viewer forget the purpose of the display the militarization of society for the teleology of making war The aesthetics allows an anaesthetization of reception a viewing of the scene with disinterested pleasure even when that scene is the preparation through ritual of a whole society for unquestioning sacrifice and ultimately destruction murshyder and death

In Triumph of the Will Rudolf Hess shouts out to the crowd in the arena Germany is Hitler and Hitler is Germany And so we come to the second selfshydefinition of fascism The intentional meaning is that Hitler embodies the entire power of the German nation But if we turn the camera on Hitler in a nonauratic

126 Benjamin Gesa7fl1lUlte Schriftm I p 1039 127 Cited in Rainer Stollman Fascist Politics as a Total Work of Art New German Critique 14 (Spring 1978) p 47


manner that is if we use this technological apparatus as an aid to sensory comprehension of the external world rather than as a phantasmagoric or narcissistic escape from it we see something very different

We know that in 1932 (under the direction of the opera singer Paul Devrient) Hitler practiced his facial expressions in front of a mirror128 in order to have what he believed was the proper effect There is reason to believe that this effect was not expressive but reflective giving back to the man-in-theshycrowd his own image-the narcissistic image of the intact ego constructed against the fear of the body-in-pieces 129

In 1872 Charles Darwin published The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals expressing his own indebtedness to the work of Charles Bell Darwins book was the first of its kind to make use of photographs rather than drawings which allowed a greater precision of analysis of the facial expressions of human emotions If one compares photographs of Hitlers facial expressions as he practiced in front of a mirror with the photographs in Darwins book one might expect to find that his expressions connote aggressive emotionsshyanger and rage Or one might presume that Hitler should have tried to project the impervious armored face that Junger describes and that was so typical of Nazi art But in fact the two emotions described by Darwin that match Hitlers photographs are quite different from both of these

The first emotion is fear Listen to Darwins description

As fear increases into an agony of terror the wings of the nostrils are wildly dilated there is a gasping and convulsive motion of the lips a tremor on the hollow cheek eyeballs are fixed on the object of terror the muscles of the body may become rigid hands are alternately clenched and opened [t]he arms may be protruded as if to avert some dreadful danger or may be thrown wildly over the head1lo

There is a second emotion identifiable in Hitlers gestures It is what Darwin calls suffering of the body and mind weeping and the relevant photographs are specifically the faces of screaming and weeping infants Darwin writes

128 Hitler had so strained his voice organs by 1932 that a doctor advised him to train his voice with Devrient (born Paul Stieber-Walter) which Hider did between April and November of that year during his election touring (See Werner Maser Adolf Hitler Legtnde MtIws Wir41ichlreit [Munshyich Bechtle Verlag 1976J p 294n) 129 Max Picard speaks from direct experience of the absolute nullity that was Hitlers face a face not like one who leads but like one who needs leading (Picard Hiller in Ourselves trans Heinrich Hauser [Hinsdale III Henry Regnery Company 1947J p 78) 130 Charles Darwin The Expression of the Emolions in Man and Animals preface Konrad Lorenz (Chicago University of Chicago Press 1965) p 291

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The raising of the upper lip draws upward the flesh of the upper pans of the cheeks and produces a strongly-marked fold on each cheek-the naso-Iabial fold-which runs from near the wings of the nostrils to the comers of the mouth and below them This fold or furrow may be seen in all the photographs and it is very characteristic of the expression of a crying child 151

The camera can aid us in knowledge of fascism because it provides an aesshythetic experience that is nona uratic critically testingls capturing with its unconscious opticsI precisely the dynamics of narcissism on which the politics of fascism depends but which its own auratic aesthetics conceals Such knowlshyedge is not historicist The juxtaposition of photographs of Hiders face and Darwins illustrations will not answer the complexities of von Rankes question of how it actually was in Germany or what determined the uniqueness of its history Rather the juxtaposition creates a synthetic experience that resonates with our own time providing us today with a double recognition-first of our own infancy in which for so many of us the face of Hider appeared as evil incarnate the bogeyman of our own childhood fears Second it shocks us into awareness that the narcissism that we have developed as adults that functions as an anaesthetizing tactic against the shock of modem experience-and that is appealed to daily by the image-phantasmagoria of mass culture-is the ground from which fascism can again push forth To cite Benjamin In shutting out the experience [of the inhospitable blinding age of big-scale industrialism] the eye perceives an experience of a complementary nature in the form of its spontaneous after-imageI14 Fascism is that afterimage In its reflecting mirror we recognize ourselves

131 Ibid p 149 132 Benjamin Illuminations p 229 133 Ibidbull p 237 134 Benjamin B~tuklaiTlI p Ill

Aesthetics and Anaesthetics Walter Benjamins Artwork

Essay Reconsidered

SUSAN BUCKmiddotMORSS

I

Walter Benjamins essay The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproductionl is generally taken to be an affirmation of mass culture and of the new technologies through which it is disseminated And rightly so Benjamin praises the cognitive hence political potential of technologically mediated culshytural experience (film is particularly privileged)2 Yet the dosing section of this 1936 essay reverses the optimistic tone It sounds a warning Fascism is a violation of the technical apparatus that parallels fascisms violent attempt to organize the newly proletarianized masses -not by giving them their due but by allowing them to express themselves5 The logical result of Fascism is the introduction of aesthetics into politicallife4

Benjamin seldom makes sweeping condemnations but here he states catshyegorically All efforts to render politics aesthetic culminate in one thing war He is writing during the early period of fascist military adventurism-Italys colonial war in Ethiopia Germanys intervention in the Spanish Civil War Yet Benjamin recognizes that the aesthetic justification of this policy was already in place at the centurys start It was the Futurists who just before World War I

I am grateful to Joan Sage for her help with the photographs for this piece I This is the now-conventional English translation (see Harry Zohn trans IUuminations ed Hannah Arendt [New York Schocken Books 1969]) The literal translation of the German tide is significantly different The Anwork in the Age of its Technological Reproducibility (technischm Reprodwierbarlleit) I have sidestepped the problem by using a shonened form Artwork essay 2 The best reading of Benjamins Anwork essay remains Miriam Hansens essay Benjamin Cinema and Experience The Blue Flower in the Land of Technology Ntw GtTllQn Critique 40 (Winter 1987) 3 The masses have the right to a change in propeny relations Fascism seeks to give them a form of expression in the preservation of these relations (Benjamin IUuminations p 241 trans modified) 4 Ibid S Ibid

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Documents

The MIT Pressrlstrick/rsvtxt/buckmorss.pdf · sensitivity to cultural norms of beauty), all of this is a posteriori. The senses maintain an uncivilized and uncivilizable trace, a